Michael, thanks so much for some more of your extremely useful documentation. Would it be possible to have a word/editable version of the target documents, to enable us to try re-wording for the children to have in their books as target cards? Many thanks, Russ (Wiltshire)

As head of a Church School I’m mindful that attainment (and progress) in RE are expected to be approximately equal to those achieved in English. Any chance that you’re working on Key Objectives for R.E.?

Have you had any further thoughts about how the Y3/4 teachers will take ownership/accountability for the objectives when they are grouped for Reading and Writing? They won’t both be able to achieve 85%….just thinking!

We’re in the ‘fortunate’ position of having split year groups that means teachers are accountable for both of the 3/4 and 5/6 years, so it’s less of an issue for us.
That said, I think any schools with separate year groups will need to consider how they address it individually as it will differ between schools. It would be feasible to ‘differentiate’ many of the objectives so that you have a waypoint at the end of Y3 or Y5. But bear in mind that what you’re talking about here is individual teachers’ accountability, not anything educational. One of the problems of the old assessment system was that it served too many purposes, including both assessment and teacher accountability. Maybe we need to find other ways to judge teachers’ work, to remove some of the perverse incentives involved, which corrupt good assessment? 🙂

Hi, we have adopted a 0 – 4 rating for each, whereby 0 = taught but child just doesn’t get it
1 = with some assistance,
2 = independent use (but perhaps in limited contexts)
3 = mastery, independently and correctly applied in a variety of contexts
4 = reserved for attainment clearly exceeding the objective
(so a blank means untaught or unassessed so far)
We could make some attempt at 1 = Autumn expectation, 2 = Spring etc, but also have to factor in the % of content covered, before coming to a conclusion about meeting age-related. Experience so far shows us that you can’t make the assumption that 33% of the content will be covered each term (in English esp, though one might in Science if learning is arranged in topics, but perhaps Science takes a back seat when History is the main focus? I’m sure you get the idea. Mixed-age classes with 2 year (or more) rolling programmes cause additional difficulties. Hope that helps. Paul.